


Reconciliation

by eluna



Series: Dean Winchester's Forays into Fanfiction [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Amnesiac Sam Winchester, Angst with a Happy Ending, Codependent Winchesters (Supernatural), Crack Treated Seriously, Diary/Journal, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotionally Hurt Dean Winchester, Emotionally Hurt Sam Winchester, Episode: s06e22 The Man Who Knew Too Much, Fix-It, In-Universe Supernatural Fanfiction, M/M, Memory Related, Meta, Miscommunication, POV Sam Winchester, Protective Sam Winchester, Sam Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Sam Winchester Writes Fanfiction, Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 06:08:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9870818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluna/pseuds/eluna
Summary: He learns to conceal first the shocking moments when a surfacing memory pulls him underwater, then the fresh visions of Lucifer that begin to weave themselves into the fabric of Sam’s everyday life, little quips and flashes of pain that he can tune out, sometimes, by digging his nails into his scarred palm. He never really reconciles the two timelines together, but the memories within the two, at least, eventually begin to settle into a sensible enough order of events. The soulless memories make Sam feel disgusted, ashamed, but they’re easier to bear than the Hell trauma, so he starts to fixate on them to distract himself from his Cage visions, making little lists in his notebook of what happened when.It’s during one of Sam’s journal sessions that he remembers Dean’s account at MoreThanBrothers.net.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to Revisionist History. Thanks to **publia** for listening to my self-deprecating whining and talking me through suggestions for how to expand upon the memory theme in the final draft. This didn't turn out quite as happy as I'd planned, but things are still a lot more hopeful here than they were in the prequel, and I promise the third and last installment in this series will be like 80% crack and much sillier than the rest of the series has been so far, as long as I don't make any major changes to its premise. Comments are appreciated!

Waking up in Bobby’s panic room with all of his memories intact reminds Sam of the moment at Sandover when Zachariah returned his true identity, when Sam Winchester collided with Sam Wesson and two disparate selves recombined into a jagged composite. Sam barely recalls his Wesson-reality anymore, but he’d been reeling during the weeks before the false implants faded, unable to reconcile the two distinct truths (even knowing that one of them wasn’t a truth at all). Every few minutes, Sam would consciously recall some Winchester-memory for the first time since losing it and buckle under its enormity, struggling to place it on the timeline of what he believed—but no longer knew for certain—to be real.

This is just as disorienting, maybe even more so, because this time Sam knows that _everything_ in the jumble of Earth and Cage memories is real, yet he’s totally incapable of parsing the two together into any kind of rational chronology. He fundamentally can’t resolve that _this_ hunt with Samuel took place the same day as _that_ bit of Devil torture because, for one thing, the Cage hadn’t exactly had a wall calendar to help him track the passage of time, and moreover, when Sam tries to gauge the length of each set of new memories, they don’t add up. He may know from Dean that he’d been missing a year and a half between the fall and the day Death restored his soul, but the undertow of soulless memories alone is too overwhelming to organize into a time frame, and the Hell memories feel—exponentially longer. If time in the Cage works anything like it did for Dean during his experience in the Pit, then Sam’s stint in Hell will have felt to his soul like—god, nearly two centuries.

Time already feels liquid and foggy, so Sam’s got no idea how long he fumbles around in the panic room just clutching his head and groaning as his whole flesh stings with phantom burns, blisters, skinning. He has to _go_ , has to get out of this house and find his brother and Bobby before Castiel goes completely off the rails, but Sam won’t be of any use to anybody as long as he’s in the throes of a panic attack, and he doesn’t want Dean to have to see him like this and worry, not with everything else that’s already at stake.

He learns to conceal first the shocking moments when a surfacing memory pulls him underwater, then the fresh visions of Lucifer that begin to weave themselves into the fabric of Sam’s everyday life, little quips and flashes of pain that he can tune out, sometimes, by digging his nails into his scarred palm. He never really reconciles the two timelines together, but the memories within the two, at least, eventually begin to settle into a sensible enough order of events. The soulless memories make Sam feel disgusted, ashamed, but they’re easier to bear than the Hell trauma, so he starts to fixate on them to distract himself from his Cage visions, making little lists in his notebook of what happened when.

 _Bobby John_ , Sam scrawls in the margin of one page, drawing an arrow from the phrase to the line between _Dean back_ and _Alpha skinwalker_. Frowning, he chews on the end of his pen for a minute before adding to the side of the narrow list, _This one should feel funny in retrospect—Dean babysitting, come on—but it doesn’t. It’s weird. All my new topside memories just feel empty because I didn’t feel anything when they happened and at the same time as that makes them seem like they belong to somebody else and not me—because it’s not how I would react to things now—I still remember what it felt like to feel nothing like that. Like nothing mattered, like I should have been scared but I couldn’t be bothered to even feel that. I knew that hunting things and Dean’s happiness used to be important so I tried to protect people and protect Dean because I thought maybe that would matter later but it didn’t at that time really. And then Dean found out I was lying about being normal and it got harder to gloss things over. Until it didn’t seem worth the effort to pretend anymore when it wasn’t working just made him mad. I didn’t want him to be mad exactly but I didn’t really want anything else instead either. It was even worse than when Dean was dead, first in Florida for six months before I tracked down Gabriel and then the four months he was in Hell. I felt numb then too but at least I still cared about something. Getting Dean back or the second time when I couldn’t about avenging him. I got so lost in it but at least I still felt something._

He snaps the notebook shut and deliberately doesn’t think more about what he’s written, but the rest of the day, he feels—lighter, even with Lucifer bitching at him about all the things he’s going to do to Sam when he pulls him back to the reality of the Cage.

-

It’s during one of Sam’s journal sessions that he remembers Dean’s account at MoreThanBrothers.net, the erotica he’d been writing and inserting into their childhood, and the blowjob he’d given Sam after being discovered. Oh, no, no—and Sam staggers upward and barely makes it to the bathroom before retching all over the tiled floor.

One of the worst parts is that Sam’s been—not _enjoying_ sifting through the Earth memories, exactly, but it’s felt almost like a refuge to lose himself in them whenever Hell gets to feel too overpowering. Sam had felt in control then, at least, and if the decisions he’d made had been even more exquisitely horrifying than his usual fare, at least they’d been his, which is more than he can say for what Lucifer and Michael put his naked soul through in the Cage. To think that Sam’s been reveling in those memories, in their agency and their simplicity, when all this time, Dean must have believed that Sam remembered all along and—deserved, probably, the way Sam initially reacted—makes Sam feel quite literally ill.

Now that he’s remembering it, the scene is crystal-clear in his mind, as if it just happened mere days ago: they all seem that way when they come back to Sam, and even the deluge of new events to document doesn’t make his pre-Hell memories seem any further away. Honestly, the combined effect just makes his head hurt when he spends too much time thinking about the past, but he owes it to Dean to grit his teeth and hone in on this one—what happened and whatever the hell he’s going to need to do to make it right.

It’s not like Sam’s ever thought about his brother sexually before, but is the memory really a surprise, or is it just a first manifestation of something that’s been simmering in his unconscious this whole time? He thinks hard about the wet heat of Dean’s tight _mouth_ on him, the resignation on his face from where he’d knelt on the ground, and Sam—loathes himself, yes, but inexplicably also just really wants a do-over.

Predictably, Dean doesn’t want to talk about it, but that doesn’t stop Sam from trying to apologize. They only just reunited in Lily Dale a few days earlier following their fight about Amy’s death, and Sam, probably naively, tries to take advantage of Dean’s good mood to initiate the conversation. “I remembered something,” he says two hours into the drive to a possible skinwalker hunt in Wyoming, Dean behind the wheel of the stolen, scuffed-up Dodge.

“Like, something from your year underground something? Didn’t you get all that back as soon as the wall came down?”

“Something from when I was soulless. It’s all in there already, yeah, just… it was kind of a big information dump, and it’s taking a while to sort it all out, especially the pieces I didn’t already know about.”

“I thought Cas ran it all down for you as soon as Death popped your soul back in.”

Sam can see Dean’s shoulders stiffening, his knuckles turning white where he’s squeezing the steering wheel. “Cas wouldn’t have known about this part. I’m guessing you haven’t told anybody about your fanfiction account, have you?” He says it gently, a little quiver threading itself through his voice, and when Dean doesn’t answer right away, Sam tries to add, “I’m so sorry I asked you to do—”

“We’re good,” Dean growls out, sounding very much like it _isn’t_ all good.

“But—”

“I said _we’re good_ , Sammy. You weren’t you, and I… but you’re in one whole piece again, and nothing good is going to come out of over-thinking the things you did before you got your soul back.”

“Yeah, but Dean, I still think we should talk about the fact that you’ve been—”

“Sammy,” he says thinly and slowly, “shut your freakin’ cakehole before I crash this piece-of-crap car in a ditch. Discussion’s closed.”

Searching Dean’s face for a long moment doesn’t turn anything up: he’s totally unreadable beneath his carefully-positioned mask of fury, eyes narrowed and steeled on the road, a flush of anger (or embarrassment?) starting to rise in his cheeks and neck. Eventually, Sam rips his gaze away from his brother and rummages through the glove box for his notebook, grimacing at the long lists of soulless crimes delineated on the open page, neat and cold, before he turns to a clean page and clicks open his pen.

 _It’s hard to tell exactly how honest Dean was being in the stories I read_ , Sam scribbles, _since I definitely don’t remember getting lucky that often that early in my life, let alone with him. But I think even the lies we tell ourselves reveal things about us. In his case maybe that he was lonely. Maybe that he didn’t stop grieving even when I came back, and that would have been wise of him to realize I was back but still gone at the same time too. I always knew my brother and I were more tangled up than anyone thought was healthy but I hadn’t had any idea about the fantasies until I found them so I can’t say for sure what they say about what he feels for me or for how long. But if he’s anything like me he wouldn’t have known he felt that way until he encountered it by accident somehow and even then he would have wanted only some parts of it. The closeness, okay yeah, and the friction and the making each other feel good. Not so much the reality of butt sex and nakedness._

_But, Dean. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t give that in order to have that, and I feel ashamed of how I acted but it isn’t just a guilt thing, or an obligation._

_I’ve read all his daydreams so it’s only fair to let him see in my own thoughts too. They go a little like this: The hand thing isn’t working tonight, but Lucifer still starts slipping out of focus the longer Dean kisses me…_

-

Later, when they reach Wyoming and Dean calls first shower, Sam tears the pages out of his notebook and sets them on top of Dean’s duffel on his bed. He makes a beeline for the bathroom the instant Dean emerges in a cloud of steam, and Sam locks the door just in time as he hears Dean erupt from the main room, “Sammy, what the _hell_?”

“Just read the note, Dean,” Sam sighs, low and terrified, as he switches on the water.

“If this is your idea of some sick joke—”

“It’s not a joke. Just read it, _please_.”

Dean falls silent at that for a long time, longer by far than it should realistically take him to finish reading, and Sam hides in the shower like a sniveling coward and starts to shiver as the water starts to sluice icy-cold against him. Finally, _finally_ , he hears rapping at the bathroom door. “Open up, dude. I can bust this open myself if you make me, but I was looking forward to getting our deposit back on the—room.”

He trails off as Sam swings the door open, naked and dripping all over the tiles, trying to conceal as much of his towering frame as he can behind the door. “Hey,” Sam hedges, shifting on his feet.

“You wrote porn for me,” says Dean, his jaw hanging loose and dumbfounded.

“It was only fair. I read yours.”

“You wrote _porn_ for me _about us_.”

Shrugging limply, Sam says, “So did you.”

Dean gapes at him for a few seconds longer before edging past the door to join Sam in the bathroom. He’s dressed himself in only a thin T-shirt and a worn pair of jeans, and Sam’s stomach clenches as he catches sight of the dark thatch of hair peeking out from Dean’s waistband. “I hate it,” Dean says on a sigh, “when everybody thinks they know me just because they’ve read fake shit based on Chuck’s books.”

“I’m not judging you,” says Sam quickly, and then he adds, “Sometimes you feel so far away I can’t even breathe, Dean, and the whole time you’re sitting two feet away.”

“Somehow, I think introducing an incestuous sexual component to our relationship is just going to make that start happening more often, not less.” Sam shoots him a half-smile, and Dean adds, soft and husky, “Were you being serious about the thing with the…?” and he makes a lewd gesture that sends a hot pulse of arousal directly to Sam’s groin.

“I’m serious if you are,” he says, and Dean pauses, then nods and flashes Sam a tiny little smile.


End file.
